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Please try again later. Audio version: Brilliance Audio, , read by Christian Rummel. I have had one of those player pianos for forty years, and I think it dates from the turn of the previous century. I passed HSC piano by pounding its keys for three hours a day and I have it still.
The player bellows need restoring: it produces a good workout for the thighs but not much sound, and I suspect that the piano rolls probably have silverfish holese as well by now because they are in a hard-to-reach cupboard. But I consider it a friendly piece of automation — it was designed so that families could gather round for a singalong even if no one could play the piano, very handy for nouveau riche Australians too poor to have lessons in childhood but wanting the middle-class status symbol of cultchure.
Like Liked by 1 person. Like Like. It came up again just the other day, so not forgotten, but hopefully forgiven. There is a piano in my family that resulted in an inheritance court case! Meanwhile, just this week, we have finally sold the piano that belonged to my aunt who died in October It was the right decision.
Anyhow, I enjoyed your post. I liked it. Thank you both for your piano stories. You make me think that I have probably, gradually moved from preferring ideas based writing to character based writing over these past five decades. Interesting observation re writing style. Only his early books were really sci-fi but the tag of sci-fi writer got stuck to him.
I imagine it would be a very addictive style for a writer. Sounds interesting. SF is a very difficult tag to drop. PK Dick for instance does not seem to get the recognition that he should as an early post-modernist and it seeks Vonnegut attempted the same transition, though maybe with more popular recognition.
Maybe Google buried it out of shame. You are commenting using your WordPress. You are commenting using your Google account. You are commenting using your Twitter account. You are commenting using your Facebook account.
Notify me of new comments via email. Notify me of new posts via email. An informal journal of a retired Tasmanian who loves animals, books, reading, walking, photography and sharing my world with others. That may be. But it broke my heart. I am stunned, speechless, overwhelmed. It is an act of rationalization that does not end until human life itself has become redundant in the world of technological perfection.
Vonnegut, however, does not criticize technology or the development of science per se. His aim is to show the robotic majority of humankind's need to form exclusive groups with certain patterns, protected against the outside world through specific procedures of selection.
To keep unity within the group, external enemies and propaganda are utilized effectively. The overarching topic of the uselessness of modern human beings, as explored on a deeper level in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater , receives no definite solution, as the pendulum between power and rebellion keeps moving. I felt a shiver down my spine reading about corporate team-building: a camp for brainwashing highly intelligent people.
Bilious competitiveness within the organisation is lauded, as long as it follows prescribed rules, while search for personal freedom and creativity is punished, severely. But it was a frozen smile, and it hurt. Helpless, powerless, quixotic, main character Proteus goes from one collective organisation to the next: socialized to be one in a group, he has few weapons, and the message seems to be that as an individual, you are prey, alone, hiding in a world of brutal predators who justify their evil with the commandments of their corporation.
Part of the organisation, they have no personal responsibility, and hence feel no guilt. Nomen est omen. His opponent, Shepherd, embraces the dogma and is thus perfectly suited to care for sheep. When Eve ate the apple, she was the first one to break the rules of the corporation of the Garden Eden. She was expelled for it, and that is how the story goes, ever since: think for yourself, make your own decisions, speak up against illogical or inhumane rules and actions, and you are OUT!
And human! Not a takaru or citizen! View all 47 comments. Jan 22, Adina rated it it was amazing Shelves: dystopia , us. I just remembered that I did not review Player Piano. I did not have the time to do it when I finished the novel one month ago and then I forgot. I am not going to write a full review because I lost the momentum, but I have a few comments.
First of all, If you never read Kurt Vonnegut I would not start with this one. It is very good but I believe it would be better savored by readers that already enjoyed other works by the author. This is his first novel and his fragmented writing style and sati I just remembered that I did not review Player Piano. This is his first novel and his fragmented writing style and satire is not fully developed. The humor is more subtle and some of the plot is a bit dated. I started with Slaughterhouse 5 and continued with Th Cat's Cradle.
That order was fine for me. Player Piano imagines a world where most jobs became obsolete due to the extensive use of machines to replace the use of less productive humans. Kurt Vonnegut is gradually becoming one of my favorite writers. He was a genius. View all 17 comments. Jan 25, BlackOxford rated it it was amazing Shelves: american. It is way of thinking that unites the political left and right, and even transcends the ideologies of Capitalism and Marxism with their apparent conflicts about the nature of human beings and their politics.
It is an ideology that became and remains the dominant intellectual force in the world in my lifetime. This ideology goes by a name that is only occasionally used today and is probably rec The Cybernetic Script One of the most important but least discussed consequences of WWII is an ideology.
This ideology goes by a name that is only occasionally used today and is probably recognised only by specialist professionals old enough to remember it: Cybernetics.
Cybernetics is the unnamed central character in Player Piano, where it goes incognito as 'know how' developed during the war. As a scientific discipline, cybernetics is about control. Its vocabulary has largely been assimilated into general usage - systems, feedback loops, requisite variety, algorithms.
In the year that Vonnegut was writing Player Piano , cybernetics was the fashionable inter-disciplinary buzzword in fields as diverse as hormonal medicine, national government, industrial economics and computer design not to mention player pianos. And of course, in Vonnegut's obvious subject: Robotics. The big names in the social sciences of the day - von Neumann, Ashby, Weiner, Bateson, Deming, Beer, to name just a few - all had cybernetic connections through the war-effort.
Vonnegut's prescience about the effects of cybernetic thinking for things like automated factories, computer-assisted design, self-driven cars, voice-recognition and expert systems are at least as good as anyone involved in the discipline at the time.
But Vonnegut's real talent isn't predictive, it's prophetic. And his insights aren't about science, they are about ideology. He saw beneath the breathless press and stunning technological advances produced through cybernetics to how cybernetics was being used shape the manner in which human beings were to live with each other, whether they were conscious of this or not. Cybernetics was always more than a discipline or method, or even a manner of thinking.
Through general, tacit, but very real agreement on the issues of importance to be addressed, the only issues, cybernetics became an ideology, a framework, a rationale, most crucially a rationalisation of the exercise of power by the people who had power.
These are the people Vonnegut identifies as the 'elite', technical managers and their distant superiors who tend the complex cybernetic control mechanisms. But Vonnegut is far too perceptive to categorise the world simply into managers and those they manage. There is a reason why the very senior managers in Player Piano are kept vaguely in the background.
They are the only people not subject to cybernetic demands. The only thing that cybernetics cannot be used for is the decision about what constitutes a successful result of the processes involved, about how to measure value.
Player Piano was born in a world of the McCarthy hearings alluded to in the phrase 'fellow travellers' , the most blatant attempt to institutionalise the definition of success until recent times.
Success is defined elsewhere than by the factory managers in Player Piano, in the higher reaches of corporate management, beyond the pay grade of a Proteus and his colleagues in Ilium incidentally the Latin for guts, including the highly vulnerable testicles; as well as another name for Troy, of the treacherous horse. And however value is defined, it is not a process or a result to be tampered with in Vonnegut's world at the level of mere management professionals.
A successful result of a cybernetic process might be defined in terms of efficiency, or speed, or innovation, or profit, consumer satisfaction, or literally anything the human mind might conjure. Whatever it is, it is hard wired into the little tape loops that run each machine in Ilium's massive factories.
But nothing within the discipline of cybernetics gave a clue as to which of these measures of success was appropriate, or best, or acceptable. This is the lynchpin of Vonnegut's narrative. It is not mere Luddite sabotage of the machines that is the threat to Ilium's stability but rather changes to the criteria embedded in the tapes and the authority that creates them. It is the control boxes that must be kept locked and secure.
These are the tabernacles in which the secret decisions about what constitutes value are hidden and from which these decisions invisibly control both the machines and the factory managers. It is these tiny sanctuaries not the gigantic integrated chains of machines that are the driving force of Vonnegut's fiction.
Except that this situation wasn't, and isn't, only a fiction. The separation of the management of cybernetically controlled systems and the choice of their criteria of success, that is to say, their value, is the core of cybernetics as an ideology. In both Player Piano and in the world as it has evolved, this separation has largely come to pass. Politically, this has gone largely unnoticed by those most affected by the ideology. This malaise is spiritual rather than material. Although unemployed, the plebs are not homeless or starving.
But since the removal of the corporate ladder, which had given apparent purpose to life and by which they might have advanced a central element of the post-war American Dream , they are dissatisfied and unruly. The most hopeful aspect of Player Piano is that they don't seem to want the corporate ladder back!
As a prophet not a forecaster, Vonnegut got some things wrong. What he mainly got wrong was the precise mode in which the cybernetic ideology was to play out. He reckoned, along with many philosophers and social scientists of the time, that the managerial elite would dominate through their control of manufacturing and transport.
This is how the Robber Barons in the late 19th century and the Russian soviets had already done it. What no one, literally no one, at the time anticipated was that even the manufacturing elite wouldn't be high enough up the cybernetic food chain to set the criteria for success. This would be left to the even more remote Captains of Finance not the contemporary Lords of Industry. Given that neither Karl Marx nor Frederik Hayek saw that one coming, we might want to overlook Vonnegut's slip.
Vonnegut couldn't see the impending shift because Finance in America, as everywhere else, was still Capitalist Finance in Not for a decade did cybernetics under a new heading of Corporate Finance, as a real discipline and an ideology, become identifiable as a visible intellectual force. And not for yet another decade was this force great enough to shift corporate power decisively from the capitalists who make things to the capitalists who finance things.
It is unarguable that today it is the likes of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley rather than General Motors or General Electric that dominate the world economy and a large portion of its social ambitions as well. The transition is complete. Same cybernetic ideology, just a different cast of corporate characters.
And Vonnegut wrote the script. Unfortunately Trump not Proteus is leading the revolution. View all 33 comments. Jan 15, J. Sutton rated it really liked it. When Kurt Vonnegut does dystopia as he does in his first novel, Player Piano , you know it's not an empty idea for him to rail against, but a way for him and us to work out the implications of a new reality, in this case, our desire to improve the world with technology.
In this early dystopian vision set in the near future after WWIII , the world is nearly completely automated like the player piano. Society's needs are apparently met. Far from bringing about happiness, automation only serv When Kurt Vonnegut does dystopia as he does in his first novel, Player Piano , you know it's not an empty idea for him to rail against, but a way for him and us to work out the implications of a new reality, in this case, our desire to improve the world with technology.
Far from bringing about happiness, automation only serves to alienate the upper class from the rest of society who no longer have any purpose. The plot follows engineer Paul Proteus from dissatisfaction with the kind of life automation produces to outright rebellion. This is a chilling and sometimes darkly funny satire of a world in which technology has the upper hand.
If humanity had purpose, it was usurped by the machines. Vonnegut's humanism is evident along with an idiosyncratic style which will continue to characterize his work.
I'm looking forward to reading more Vonnegut! View all 10 comments. It depicts a dystopia of automation, describing the negative impact it can have on quality of life. The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers.
The widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class, the engineers and managers, who keep society running, and the lower class, whose skil Player Piano, Kurt Vonnegut Player Piano is the first novel of American writer Kurt Vonnegut, published in The widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class, the engineers and managers, who keep society running, and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines.
The book uses irony and sentimentality, which were to become hallmarks developed further in Vonnegut's later works. Player Piano is set in the near future, after a third world war.
While most Americans were fighting overseas, the nation's managers and engineers faced a depleted workforce and responded by developing ingenious automated systems that allowed the factories to operate with only a few workers. The novel begins ten years after the war, when most factory workers have been replaced by machines.
The bifurcation of the population is represented by the division of Ilium, New York into "The Homestead," where every person not a manager or an engineer lives, and the other side of the river, where all the engineers and the managers live. View 2 comments. In his first novel, published in , Vonnegut envisages a dystopian future where nearly all jobs have been rationalised away by increasing automation.
But, just when things seem most hopeless, a saviour appears in the form of a brash, uncouth but lovable billionaire, who, despite having no previous political experience, rides a populist wave to become President. He immediately expels all illegal immigrants and starts a war against an alliance of Middle Eastern and Asian countries.
Within month In his first novel, published in , Vonnegut envisages a dystopian future where nearly all jobs have been rationalised away by increasing automation. Within months, America's downtrodden poor are again leading full, meaningful lives as fruit pickers, hotel staff, prostitutes and cannon fodder, and the country enters a new golden age. View all 57 comments. Aug 31, Lyn rated it really liked it.
Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut was his first novel, first published in Early fiction from Vonnegut is told in a more straightforward fashion than Vonnegut readers will be accustomed to from his later works, but his imagination and wit are still unmistakable. Government work available to displaced workers comes from either the Army, emasculated and bureaucra Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut was his first novel, first published in Government work available to displaced workers comes from either the Army, emasculated and bureaucratic, or the reconstitution and reclamation corps, the Reeks and the Wrecks, a civil organization where workers have military-esque occupational titles such as asphalt layer first class and senior street sweeper.
Funny and thought provoking this ushered in a long and prolific career for Vonnegut. Nov 25, Leonard Gaya rated it really liked it. Vonnegut wrote Player Piano in his late twenties, and it is the first novel in his long and successful literary career. In short, there is still some way to go before the Slaughterhouse-Five meta-fictional, po-mo craziness. However, the distinctive featur Vonnegut wrote Player Piano in his late twenties, and it is the first novel in his long and successful literary career.
The subject of this novel is worth noticing as well. Player Piano falls into the speculative-fiction genre: in an unspecified near future, American corporations and industries are getting increasingly automated, computerised; managers and engineers are the cream of society, and the rest have, by and large, lost their jobs to machines — soon enough, one might reckon, engineers and managers will lose their grip as well Interestingly, Vonnegut compares this profound socio-economic shift to the destruction of Native-American cultures at the hand of white settlers, as if modern society was, in its turn, about to be subjugated: The world had changed radically for the Indians.
It was impossible to hold the old Indian values in the changed world. The only thing they could do in the changed world was to become second-rate white men or wards of the white men. LoA, pp. But devising, as early as , a world were computerised technology and algorithms would practically control for better or for worse every aspect of our lives was nothing short of visionary.
But underneath it all, this is the book of a compassionate humanist. View all 5 comments. In a world where actuaries in Japan are getting fired by the hundreds because an algorithm now does their job, where Amazon's utterly creepy house robot Echo can organize your life and transfer info on your every move to God knows who, and where Google has created AIs that live on the Internet and talk to each other in an encrypted language so sophisticated that humans can't figure out what they are saying, "Player Piano" is eerily prescient.
In fact, as someone who works for a major insurance co In a world where actuaries in Japan are getting fired by the hundreds because an algorithm now does their job, where Amazon's utterly creepy house robot Echo can organize your life and transfer info on your every move to God knows who, and where Google has created AIs that live on the Internet and talk to each other in an encrypted language so sophisticated that humans can't figure out what they are saying, "Player Piano" is eerily prescient.
In fact, as someone who works for a major insurance company and who knows just how ridiculously dependent we are on your technology working well and how much we want our employees to be devoted body and soul to the company, this book felt disturbingly familiar from the very first page. In a not so distant future, everything has been automatized and machines do all the work, nobody starves and the only jobs still available are the ones that can't be replaced by machines But of course, a chasm exists between those who do simple manual work and the engineers and managers who overlook the exactitude of all those machines, effectively creating a polarized society.
Paul Proteus, an important engineer and manager of Ilium Works, can feel that something is not quite right with his life and with the world, but does not know how to deal with his malaise. His old friend and colleague Ed Finnerty has acknowledged that this way of life is hollow and unfulfilling a long time ago and resists the systematic automation of everything by not fitting into the mold of the brilliant engineer that he is.
One day, Paul is asked to betray his integrity for a better job and a secure social position and he finds himself incapable of doing it. He decides to rebel against this life that now feels so meaningless, but it's not as easy to escape the corporate beast as he seems to think. Especially when computers have a record of your entire lives In a parallel story line, we accompany the Shah of Bratpuhr's visit to America, his incapacity to perceive people who are not in charge as anything other than slaves despite his translator's best efforts , and his amusement at the exotic and illogical American way of life.
The idea of the corporation as a Church, its employees as its worshipers and its executives as clergy is obviously not a new one, but it gave me a uncomfortable shiver. The corporate retreat, which is essentially a brain-washing vacation meant to cultivate your bond to the company and with your colleagues, the long ridiculous titles meant to glorify the simplest of jobs, more executives than executants I see these things going on every day at work, and it's creepy.
Add to that a President who is an actor, because charisma is more important than political skill for that job It makes me uncomfortable on so many levels Some people seem to think that Vonnegut has not yet sharpened his trademark wit and dark humor to their full potential when he wrote "Player Piano", but I found him to be just as brutally funny, vitriolic in his commentary and thought-provoking as in his later works. He had his finger on the simple reality that without a sense of purpose and usefulness, humans will loose their sense of identity and their spirits, and he wrote a great book about it.
Of course, he missed the mark on a few things: the Rust Belt's downfall, for instance. And the very old-fashioned gender-roles made me roll my eyes a few times. But dismissing this work just because a few things are not perfectly predicted would be a mistake. I recommend it to everyone. I had hoped to like the book better as a seasoned adult, but instead I found re-reading Player Piano to be a tedious chore which surprised me, as this year I have returned to Slaughterhouse-Five , Jailbird and God Bless You, Mr.
Rosewater , and enjoyed all of them. Alas, Player Piano did not have much to offer me this second time around. Regular folks like you and me unless you happen to be a manager or an engineer lead mundane lives outside the enclaves of these giants of industry in a way Margaret Atwood has created a similar society in her Maddaddam trilogy with her Compounds populated by elite genengineers while the rest of the population lives in the chaotic pleeblands , but their dreary lives have been robbed of satisfaction because machines have taken away most of what they have done in the past to find meaning in their lives.
For a dystopian society, the world of Player Piano is a fairly mundane place, with no Thought Police or Hunger Games, but the effect on the everyday citizen is still soul crushing. Interestingly, however, Vonnegut has written his book before either of those two novels. Paul Proteus leads the perfect life. He is head of the Ilium Works, married to a beautiful wife and being groomed to take over Pittsburgh humorously, in an author might have seen Pittsburgh as the future locus of industry and technology!
If anything, it can be delved into as a sort of artifact and a pretty interesting one at that. Here, in his first novel, he goes for plodding linear narrative, third person narration, and pedestrian character development, three techniques that he abandons over the next ten years. Nonetheless, the reader can see a hint of what is to come in later books, especially in the subplot weaving its way through the novel with the comic figure of the Shah of Bratpuhr who is taking a tour of the United States accompanied by a State Department handler.
Citizen — Takaru. God Bless You, Mr. View all 13 comments. Jun 05, Sebastien rated it it was ok. Disappointed in this one, it was underwhelming. I hadn't read Vonnegut in a long time and was excited to read this. Unfortunately I found the characters rather unlikable, obnoxious, one-dimensional caricatures, while the narrative operated like a chess game in which I could guess most every move before it was made.
I also found the messaging heavy-handed. Yeah, I agree or at least am concerned with most of the themes brought up, but it was done with a lack of subtlety that grated on me. In terms Disappointed in this one, it was underwhelming.
In terms of the societal and cultural critique I generally align with many of Vonnegut's positions. The critique encompasses worship of technology, efficiency, productivity, growth, meritocracy, materialism above all else. There is critique of elites hoarding opportunities, classism, all powerful and dictatorial corporations that strip away our rights couching it under the guise of "freedom" and "progress", the rules and rigidity of corporate management and bureaucracy, marriage of corporations and police state.
In this atmosphere the powerful use their moralizing as a cudgel on "poorer" people the underclass to strip away their humanity sound familiar? Warps into a vulgar sort of anti-humanism camouflaged by grandiose and caricatured moralizing. In this book elites tell themselves they are heroes, moral heroes, saving the rest of humanity while in actuality most of their actions and motives are self-serving and based on consolidating or increasing their power.
Vonnegut makes commentary on all that. The one aspect he doesn't touch on is the environmental aspect and worries from an unrestrained system that cannibalizes everything in sight, and for me I see that as one of the most important issues that could lead to global civilizational crisis.
But it's completely understandable that he doesn't hit this aspect because I don't think it was in the cultural zeitgeist of the times, it would take a few decades before this concern would really start to blossom in the culture. There is a strong critique of techno-utopianism here, and that's cool. I'm fine with that, although Vonnegut comes across as more pessimistic than me on technology. Technology is mere tool, it is how humans use and apply it that matters.
Technology, with proper policy and decent thinking, can benefit broad swathes of humanity.
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